Essays and information calling for Americans to choose a public option for national health care, with a particular emphasis on the excesses and abuses of health insurance companies in our current system.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Awakening?

A short link round-up, today, because oddly -- and I maybe have to chalk this up to more thoughtful parts of the media taking a little bit longer to mull over complicated issues like health care -- there seems to be an awful lot of really good writing about national health care reform in the electrowebs today.

First, a super-brilliant post on Metafilter demonstrating that some of the most untrue stories about health care reform come, in fact, directly from health insurance companies and related industry media organs. The post has links to a John Stewart interview with the originator of the "death panels" story, who one day later resigned from the board of directors of Cantel Medical.

Second -- and I'm not ashamed to say I look to a movie critic as a moral touchstone -- Roger Ebert made a pair of posts (part one, part two) that, among other things, point out that the "end" of the public option caused a big gain in health insurance industry stocks, compare "death panels" to the slogan "king of beers", and find the ethical roots of communally shared health care in Matthew 25, verses 31-46. It's kind of a tour de force.

Third -- Andrew Sullivan has collected and archived his posts on health care, which include the "views from your sickbeds" -- stories of what it's like to go through critical illness with American health insurance.

Finally, this op-ed by Gail Collins isn't as good as some of the stuff above, but she makes the point that the 'Gang of Six' that has been responsible for slowing down reform directly represents 2.77 percent of the American people. Thanks, guys! Allowing a small elite to paralyze reforms that serve the majority was exactly what James Madison had in mind when he argued for a bicameral legislature.